Tagged: “Misconceptions”
Three Interviews by the Media in November 2024
Image by Madison Inouye, Pexels.com
Dr. Enright had three media interviews this month with the following media outlets:
- Interview with Yowei Shaw and “Erin,” PROXY podcast by Apple, on the themes of betrayal and forgiveness, November 19, 2024.
- Interview with Makai Allbert, reporter for the international newspaper, The Epoch Times, on the themes of resentment and forgiveness, November 18, 2024.
- Interview with Dr. Rodrigo Nardi, psychiatrist, for his podcast with the New England Psychiatry Mentoring Institute, on the topic of forgiveness therapy, November 16, 2024.
I have engaged in the exercises of your Process Model of Forgiveness, trying to see the woundedness in the one who hurt me. Yet, I am still very angry. I want to be nasty to this person so I can get even. What advice do you have for me on this?
One homework assignment that we give to those who are in the process of forgiveness is to “do no harm” to the offending person. In other words, you make a commitment to yourself not to retaliate, even with words, so that the other person and you do not keep passing the pain back and forth. As you commit to “do no harm,” this tends to start reducing your anger. It also serves as a protection for the other person.
When she hurt me over and over……and over, it is difficult to see her emotional wounds. I get angry and depressed when I attempt to look at her wounds because of all the time that was lost and the pain that was caused. I do see some movement in myself in the forgiveness process in that the anger is going down, but not deeply or fast enough for me. Will I be able to get past this and find relief from forgiveness?
Yes, I think that if you have a strong will, you will overcome this. As you say, you are making progress even if it is slow. I recommend that you not give up, even if it means fighting for your healing and enduring with a lot of patience. Don’t have high expectations too soon. The process of forgiving someone is a journey and sometimes a difficult one. However, as you practice, you gradually reduce your anger until you can see the results. As you offer mercy, that mercy likely will come back to you.
To be honest with you, I am kind of skeptical about practicing empathy toward the person who was deeply unfair to me. Here is what I mean: If I see his emotional struggles, his confusion, and his pain, I may begin to say to myself, “Oh well, under this circumstance, I can let the circumstance go and just forget about it.” Empathy, in other words, lets the other person off the hook. What do you think?
When we forgive, we start with this assumption: What the other person did to me was unfair, is unfair, and always will be unfair. Our forgiveness of the other does not excuse what was done. We can be kinder to the person even though the actions were unjust and will remain so. This makes forgiveness a very special moral virtue because we are doing our best to be good to those who are not good to us.
When we forgive, does our anger characteristically go away completely?
The answer depends on the depth of the hurt and who hurt us. If we are profoundly hurt, for example, by a spouse who is supposed to be good to us, even when we forgive, some residual anger can remain. In this circumstance, you might consider persevering in forgiving even when you sense that you have forgiven well. Some residual anger is not an indication that you are unforgiving. As the late Lewis Smedes said in his book, Forgive and Forget (1984), we are all imperfect forgivers. Therefore, all anger will not necessarily fade in the circumstance of serious injustice. The good news is that the anger no longer will be controlling you, but you will be in control of your anger.
